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Comment by aeberbach | Hacker News Reader

William Gibson's zaibatsu come to mind. When they stop people getting off the bus rather than on it will be complete.

As someone who came of age in the 80s completely infatuated with all things cyberpunk growing up, and now having worked in Silicon Valley my whole career, taking me all over the globe working on computers: I am so amazed that the world Gibson laid out for 2020 is exactly what we have been building.

I am amazed that my daughter will be, in the year 2020, living in the world I imagined and RPGd in at the same age I was at that time (I was 17 years old, playing cyberpunk RPG where my character was living as a 17 year old in the year 2020)

If you have ever been to Singapore, and seen the private security-police, Cisco (not the networking company), that is the city of the cyberpunk world....

I am in love with, terrified by and amazed at our world.

Can you expand on some context for this?

In Gibson's books the zaibatsu are huge corporations where the top employees are not free to leave. Switching jobs involves your new employer hiring a team of mercenary specialists to extract the new hire. Often the principal does not survive. See "Neuromancer"and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" and they should be enough to get you hooked!

"zaibatsu" is the name of the book?

_Mona Lisa Overdrive_ and _Neuromancer_ are the book titles, "zaibatsu" are a feature within the plot.

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